Victorian
Housing grew in reaction to the increase of population which doubled
between 1841 and 1901. The middle classes who wanted to own fashionable
villas rejected the back to back terraced housing popular in the industrial
areas. The poorer factory workers stayed in the cramped housing within
the cities but the aspiring middle classes moved to the suburbs to larger
properties with gardens.

Speculative builders
bought small plots of land off farmers and built rows of identical housing.
The interior layout tended to stay the same with a hall leading to two
rooms on each floor. The exterior would have been built with local bricks
and the fashionable decorative detail would have been ordered from building
merchants and catalogues.

The builders would
have sold the houses to landlords or become landlords themselves leasing
to tenants. Very few people owned their homes.

Many Victorian housing
were not built with adequate drainage and services to the properties.
It was not until the mid to late Victorian period that houses were built
with with adequate sanitation. The Public
Health Act of 1848 enabled local authorities to enforce better sanitation
for housing. Disease such as cholera was causing a dramatic increase
in the death rate. Under the new regulations sewage was taken away,
better drainage was put in and separate clean running water for drinking
was supplied.

Gothic:
A revival from medieval times, most recognisable by the popular pointed
arch used for windows and doors. Theses houses were asymmetrical with
the design being based around the internal layout.

Men like A.W.
Pugin and John
Ruskin (The Seven Lamps of Architecture, 1849) sincerely believed
that the Middle Ages was a watershed in human achievement and that Gothic
architecture represented the perfect marriage of spiritual and artistic
values. Ruskin and his brethren declared that only those materials which
had been available for use in the Middle Ages should be employed in
Gothic Revival buildings. (Britain Express)

Olde
English: Picturesque
and quaint style. Built to a smaller scale than other Victorian houses,
often found in villages rather than towns. Steep pitched tiled roofs
or thatched. Pointed gables with lots of carved bargeboards and roof
finials.

Arts
& Craft Movement emerged in the 1880's in reaction to the mass
production of goods in the Victorian period. Believing one craftsman
should make an item from start of finish and only using local materials.
Finished pieces would often be unvarnished and simple in design.

In 1850 the window
tax was abolished so the mid to late Victorian house saw an increase
in the use of large bay
windows. In the same year brick tax was removed so builders found
it more cost effective to build taller houses and use different styles
of brickwork like the English
bond that used more bricks.